Lot 137

Sumerian Faience & Stone Beads - One Pound Lot of Disc & Tube Beads

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Lot 137
Sumerian Faience & Stone Beads - One Pound Lot of Disc & Tube Beads

Sumerian Faience & Stone Beads - One Pound Lot of Disc & Tube Beads

Estimate: $800 - $1,200

Starting Bid: $400

(0 Bids)
by Artemis Fine Arts
August 6, 2026 9:00 AM MDT
Live Auction
686 S. Taylor Avenue
Suite 108
Louisville, CO, US 80027

Ancient Near East, Mesopotamia, Sumerian, ca. 3000–2000 BCE. A full pound of ancient beads, a dense drift of small disc and short-tube forms drilled through the center for stringing. The palette runs from bone-white and cream through smoky gray to muted earthen tones, some retaining the pale bloom typical of aged faience, a self-glazing quartz paste favored across early Mesopotamia. Others are cut from stone, worn soft at the edges by handling and burial. Individually modest, these beads once accumulated into necklaces, bracelets, garment trim, and votive offerings, worn by the living and interred with the dead. Assembled here by weight rather than by set, the lot offers thousands of authentic elements for study, restringing, or the sheer tactile pleasure of holding fragments of the world's earliest urban civilization in the palm of the hand. Size of largest bead (roughly): 0.6" W x 0.3" H (1.5 cm W x 0.8 cm H); total weight: 1lb.

Faience, an ancient siliceous paste distinct from true glass and from clay-based ceramics, was among the earliest synthetic materials, produced across Mesopotamia and Egypt from the fourth millennium BCE onward. Ground quartz was shaped and fired with an alkaline glaze that migrated to the surface during firing, yielding the characteristic vitreous sheen, here softened by millennia of burial. Disc and cylinder beads of this kind were mass-produced in Sumerian city-states such as Ur, Uruk, and Lagash, threaded into jewelry and sewn onto textiles as markers of status and as protective adornment. The Royal Cemetery at Ur, excavated by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s, famously yielded such beads by the thousands.

Provenance: Collection of Y. Kayvan, Los Angeles, California, USA, acquired from a Los Angeles, California, USA gallery acquisition dates range from the late 1990s to 2005

SHIPPING: We coordinate worldwide shipping in-house through specialist international forwarders experienced with fine art and antiquities customs manifests. International buyers must confirm, prior to bidding, that their country's customs authority will accept the item. All duties, taxes, clearance fees, and any costs arising from customs delays, seizures, re-export, returns, or loss in transit are the buyer's sole responsibility. Artemis assumes no liability for items refused entry, detained, or lost after export. We cannot ship ancient items to their country of origin (Egyptian to Egypt, Greek to Greece, etc.).

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Item # 203212

  • Condition: Nicks, chips, and losses to some beads with a few being fragmentary. Otherwise, most are intact, wearable, and in very good overall condition.

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Bid Increments
From: To: Increments:
$0 $299 $25
$300 $999 $50
$1,000 $1,999 $100
$2,000 $4,999 $250
$5,000 $9,999 $500
$10,000 $19,999 $1,000
$20,000 $49,999 $2,500
$50,000 $99,999 $5,000
$100,000 $199,999 $10,000
$200,000 + $20,000